What Makes A Programming Language Good

[bearophile]

Vladimir Panteleev:

> IMO, sticking to the C-ism of "one object file at a time" and dependency  
> on external build tools / makefiles is the biggest mistake DMD did in this  
> regard.

A Unix philosophy is to create tools that are able to do only one thing well, and rdmd uses DMD to do its job of helping compile small projects automatically. Yet the D compiler is not following that philosophy in many situations because it is doing lot of stuff beside compiling D code, like profiler, code coverage analyser, unittester, docs generator, JSON summary generator, and more. D1 compiler used to have a cute literary programming feature too, that's often used by Haskell blogs. 

Here Walter is pragmatic: docs generator happens to be quicker to create and maintain if it's built inside the compiler. So it's right to fold this rdmd functionality inside the compiler? Is this practically useful, like is this going to increase rdmd speed? Folding rdmd functionality inside the compiler may risk freezing the future evolution of future D build tools, so it has a risks/costs too.

Bye,
bearophile